Conclusion

Abstract

In the 21^st century the world is witnessing the dangerous anomaly of anachronistic forms of rule and warfare, namely non-democratic rule and stateless warfare, continuing to survive and even flourish thanks to their ability to modernise themselves. In Part I it was shown how stateless warfare, like non-democratic rule, had undergone three phases of modernisation, which had enabled the insurgent variant of stateless warfare to continue playing an important role in modern history. These three historical phases of modernisation had begun some two centuries ago with a new emphasis on nationalism that has superseded the localist and religious orientation of premodern insurgencies. The second phase, introduced by Mao Zedong, provided revolutionary insurgent bands with a new approach, namely establishing semistate base areas in which the insurgents could create regular armies capable of destroying the local state in a revolutionary civil war. But the third phase of modernisation has produced insurgencies that prefer to rely on new techniques and technology rather than on the maoist model’s approach of shifting to semistate warfare.